Travel to Charleston's Catfish Row through this adaptation of 'Porgy and Bess.' / SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER

Travel to Charleston's Catfish Row through this adaptation of 'Porgy and Bess.' / SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER

Travel to Charleston's Catfish Row through this adaptation of 'Porgy and Bess.' / SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER

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It’s hard to find anything written about “Porgy and Bess” that does not call it “the great American opera.” When it first opened in 1935, it was the first big, homegrown show to break free from European conventions.

But what makes it “great” and “American” has a lot to do with why the “opera” label is so slippery. The show is a melting pot of jazz and spirituals and the African-American folk tunes George Gershwin absorbed while he wrote the score on an island near Charleston, S.C., where the story takes place. So his final product has never really been final, lending itself instead to endless adaptations like the slimmer, trimmer Broadway version that opens Tuesday at the Des Moines Civic Center.

“George Gershwin was a very successful, popular musician,” said Diedre Murray, who adapted the new show’s score. “He wrote for Broadway, for Hollywood, for jazz up in the Cotton Club and he also felt he could go further and be a classical composer. He did all of it and like a lot of people who do all of it, he put ’em all together.”

But Murray had to pull some of ’em out. She worked with director Diane Paulus (“Pippin,” “Hair”) and scriptwriter Suzan Lori-Parks (the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize) to make the original “Porgy and Bess” more accessible for modern audiences. The team streamlined the music and replaced some of the sung-through recitatives with more natural, spoken dialogue.

“You have to open space for other art forms to tell the story,” Murray said.

In that story, based on DuBose Heyward’s original novel, struggling alcoholic Bess tries to break free from her troubled past with the help of Porgy, a crippled beggar in Charleston’s down-and-out Catfish Row. He lands in jail for stabbing her ex-boyfriend before she runs off to New York with a drug dealer.

So it’s not a pretty situation. But the music is.

“It totally blew me away,” Murray said of the first time she saw the original opera, almost 20 years ago. “I was just overwhelmed by its beauty and glory. It was really kind of breathtaking.”

Plenty of other musicians felt the same way. The show’s most famous songs — “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So” — leave lots of room for interpretation, which is why they became signature numbers for Billie Holiday, Sidney Bechet, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Nina Simone — even Janis Joplin — and Iowa’s own Simon Estes.

The latest addition to that list is Audra McDonald, who won a 2012 Tony Award for her role as Bess in the new adaptation, which also won that year’s Tony for the best musical revival. (Alicia Hall Moran plays Bess in the current tour, opposite Nathaniel Stampley’s Porgy, although McDonald plans to visit next February for a pops concert with the Des Moines Symphony.)

Despite its awards and the blessing of the Gershwin estate, the new “Porgy and Bess” drew mixed reviews from those who called it “politically radical and dramaturgically original” to “sanitized.” The composer Stephen Sondheim wrote a scathing letter to the New York Times that ripped apart the alleged distortion of the original characters. And there are still naysayers who think a Jewish white guy like Gershwin was out of bounds in the first place for writing what he called a “Negro folk opera.”

But really, what “great American” anything doesn’t come with some controversy? The messy debate only strengthens the show’s stature.

“Gershwin was the ultimate crossover artist and that’s all we do now,” Murray said. “The world is moving so fast culturally. It’s speeding, you know? You gotta just open your ears.”